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Hope Summerell Chamberlain, Old Days in Chapel Hill (1926).Open the sourceAll sources
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Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1820s
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James Phillips buys Ben and Dilsey, an enslaved married couple, soon after reaching Chapel Hill
Soon after he arrived in Chapel Hill, professor James Phillips bought a married couple, Ben and Dilsey. They lived with the family for decades and appear throughout Spencer's letters.
- 1830s
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The evangelist Nettleton preaches in Chapel Hill and a revival follows
James Phillips and William Hooper rode to Virginia in the summer vacation to hear the evangelist Nettleton, who then came to Chapel Hill that autumn. A religious awakening followed in both village and university, and Phillips began the preaching that led to his licensing by Orange Presbytery in 1833.
- 1840s
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Waitt clears the Glenburnie creek and cuts a road along it for a carding machine
At Glenburnie, a glen near Chapel Hill where villagers walked, a Mr. Waitt cleared the creek of its large rocks, leaving a single boulder, and cut a road along the stream to serve a wool-carding machine. By July 1843 Waitt was advertising an approved wool carding machine 'now in successful operation at his Mills near Chapel Hill', run by S. S. Claytor. Cornelia Phillips found the place hard to recognize.
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Measles spreads through Chapel Hill households
Measles went through the village in February 1845. Charles Phillips was laid up with it, and at the Mitchell house ten people were waiting to come down with it.
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Trustees dismiss students after a riot at the college
After a large disturbance among the students, trustees were called in and treated the offenders more lightly than the faculty wanted, dismissing them rather than expelling them.
- 1850s
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Cornelia Phillips marries James Munroe Spencer in Chapel Hill
Cornelia Phillips married James Munroe Spencer of Alabama, a first-honor graduate of the class of 1853, who returned to Chapel Hill for the wedding. The couple then left by way of Wilmington and Charleston for his home at Clinton, Alabama.
- 1860s
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Cornelia Phillips Spencer begins teaching boys from refugee families
Widowed and growing deaf, Spencer began teaching three boys whose families had fled eastern North Carolina for Chapel Hill during the war: Baker Mallett, Hannis Taylor and Stephen Skinner. Taylor, later a writer on the English constitution, remembered her as the best-educated woman he had known.
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Freedpeople hold a Fourth of July celebration at Hillsborough
On the first Fourth of July after emancipation, freedpeople held a large celebration at Hillsborough, as others did at Raleigh. In Chapel Hill white residents held no observance, and Swain's plan for a short address was dropped.
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The university opens its first postwar session with twenty-two students
The university began its fall session with twenty-two students. The same day Swain told Spencer that the endowment was lost and the school had nothing but tuition to live on.
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Young white men clash with freedmen meeting in Chapel Hill to choose convention delegates
Freedmen met in Chapel Hill to elect delegates to their state convention, which was to ask for the right to vote, and young white men of the village and the college fell into a fight with them. Spencer recorded broken heads and arms and fear in town that a Black guard would be sent in.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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James Phillips pays Dilsey her first wages as a free woman
Dilsey and her husband Ben stayed with the Phillips family after emancipation, and in 1866 James Phillips paid Dilsey her first wages as a freedwoman with the first five-dollar gold piece he received after the war.
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Charles Phillips teaches a Sunday school for Black residents of Chapel Hill
Charles Phillips and his wife Laura taught a Sunday school for Black people in Chapel Hill, and in March 1866 a supply of books arrived from New York for it. When he left for Davidson College in 1868, a crowd of his scholars stood weeping at the gate.
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Zebulon Vance gives the commencement address on the duties of defeat
At a commencement with only three seniors but a large crowd, Zebulon B. Vance spoke on what a defeated people owed. Spencer hoped the speech would help answer the hostility then growing against the university and its faculty.
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Cornelia Phillips Spencer moves into Sam Phillips's house and takes in boarders
After her father's death Spencer moved with her daughter into her brother Sam's empty house on East Franklin Street, sleeping there first on January 13, 1868, so that she could take student boarders to make ends meet. Her widowed mother would not come with her.
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Ben and Dilsey leave the Phillips household to live on their own
Ben and Dilsey, held by the Phillips family since the 1820s and kept on as servants after emancipation, left Cornelia Phillips Spencer's household in February 1868. Spencer wrote that she hoped the parting was only for a time.
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A Chapel Hill town meeting passes resolutions against Solomon Pool's administration
Townspeople met and adopted resolutions against Pool's running of the university, an outburst of a year of pent-up anger. Shaken, Pool told the merchant Andrew Mickle that he had bought property and settled in the village and would find it hard to move.
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Chapel Hill's Black school holds a commencement with a Fayetteville brass band
The village school for Black children held its own commencement, with a procession, speeches, a dialogue and a supper, and music by a brass band from Fayetteville. Spencer printed a note on it to mock the poorly attended commencement of Pool's university.
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Chapel Hill's new commissioners levy a tax of fifty cents on the hundred dollars
The village's new board of commissioners laid a property tax of fifty cents on each hundred dollars of value, at a time when, with the university nearly empty, residents could hardly find the money to pay their town taxes.
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Great oaks are cut down in the faculty yards under the Pool administration
After the Reconstruction faculty took over the old professors' houses, old oaks in their yards were felled for firewood, among them a large tree at the Swain house that Mrs. Swain said she would not have sold for $2,000. Timber cutting later spread to the woods behind the college.
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Manuel Fetter and his daughters leave Chapel Hill at midnight for Durham
Turned out with the old faculty, professor Manuel Fetter crossed the street at midnight to give Spencer the key of his empty house and a last candle, then drove off to Durham with his three daughters.
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Cornelia Phillips Spencer publishes her Pen and Ink Sketches of the University
Writing unsigned from Chapel Hill for Josiah Turner's Raleigh Sentinel, Spencer published a series on the history of the university under its old faculty, addressed to the alumni. Other Southern papers and the North Carolina Presbyterian reprinted the sketches, and they helped build the alumni opinion that later brought the university back.
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The Pool faculty takes furniture from the society halls for their parlors
Before the June 1869 commencement, Professor David S. Patrick broke open the Philanthropic Society's door to take its velvet rugs and a carpet, and furniture was carried out of the society halls to furnish the faculty's parlors. Villagers were furious, and Alexander McIver refused to use the societies' things.
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Fisk Brewer's sister comes to Chapel Hill to teach the Black school
A sister of Fisk P. Brewer, the new professor of Greek and an outspoken supporter of Black education, came to Chapel Hill to take charge of the village school for Black children.
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Klansmen from Chatham County stone November Caldwell's house by mistake
A Ku Klux party from Chatham County rode into Chapel Hill after Ben Edwards, a man denounced in Chatham, and stoned the house of November Caldwell, taking it for his. Village youths who followed the riders were ordered off; Solomon Pool went to Raleigh for militia, but the local magistrates would not sign a petition for it.
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A Quaker teacher named Dickson is reported elected to the university's agricultural chair
Word went round Chapel Hill that a new professor had been chosen for the university's agricultural college: Dickson, an English Quaker known as a teacher and agent for Black schools. Two months later Spencer learned that the appointment had never been put before the trustees.
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A marble monument is set over the Mitchell family graves in the old Mitchell garden
A marble monument was placed over the graves of Elisha Mitchell's family members buried in the garden of his former home, then lived in by Alexander McIver's family. Mrs. McIver and Spencer agreed the dead belonged in the village graveyard.
- 1870s
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Mrs. Fordyce Hubbard and her daughter leave Chapel Hill for good
The family of the former Latin professor Fordyce M. Hubbard, whose books had been boxed for shipping, drove away from their Chapel Hill home to join him in New York, one of the last old faculty households to go.
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A squad of Holden's militia marches into Chapel Hill and camps behind the college
During the Kirk-Holden war a squad of state militia under a Dr. Emery marched into Chapel Hill and camped behind the college, while some county men took to the woods and Frederick Strudwick and William L. Saunders hid to avoid arrest. Spencer wrote the next year that the militia had broken into the Philanthropic and Dialectic society libraries and taken books.
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A public common school opens in Chapel Hill
After long delay the village's common school was running by late August 1870, taking in local boys who might otherwise have attended the Pool university as day scholars.
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Students of the Pool university board chiefly with Black families
With about fifteen students from away and as many day scholars, the Pool university's boarders lived mostly with Black households, among them those of Wilson Caldwell, John Ashe and Sam Mahew. Spencer noted that all the boys were poor and held free scholarships.
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Cornelia Phillips Spencer raises a relief fund for Chapel Hill's poor
With the university closed and few able families left, Spencer wrote to former residents and to Nancy Hilliard's old boarders for money, and kept an account book of the hundreds of dollars she gave out to needy neighbors as wood, food and cash.
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A new chemistry laboratory under the university library is lit with gas
The university fitted out a new chemical laboratory below the library, lit with gas, where students in long aprons did all their own experiments.
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Zebulon Vance delivers a memorial eulogy of David L. Swain at commencement
Governor Vance, in office a second time, gave the memorial address on the late president David L. Swain at the 1877 commencement, a year after he had given up the same assignment in anger. Spencer, unable to hear, had read his manuscript and watched Swain's old neighbors in tears.
- 1880s
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Chapel Hill women serve a dinner to the convicts building the University Railroad
Spencer collected food around the village and, with other women, served a dinner at a long plank table to ninety-six convicts grading the railroad to Chapel Hill, with Joseph Blount Cheshire saying grace. Some residents refused to give, and Colonel Thomas M. Holt promised the ladies a ride on the first train.
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Paul Cameron buys university land put up for sale
When part of the university's land around Chapel Hill was put up for sale, Spencer, fearing for places like Piney Prospect and the Roaring Fountain, wrote begging Paul C. Cameron to buy it, and Bennehan Cameron and John W. Graham came to bid for him. Cameron later left Spencer a few acres of it in his will.
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Professor Frederick W. Simonds resigns after seniors force him to retract a rebuke
After Simonds told a rowdy senior class it was acting like little boys, three students confronted him, and one cursed him as a Yankee and gave him three minutes to take it back. Simonds retracted, then resigned, saying he could not control his classes or understand Southern ways.
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